Are democracies’ economies weaker?

Arabs believe economy is weak under democracy (BBC News)

Last week the BBC highlighted the results of a survey conducted in a number of Arab countries which found that people are losing faith in the ability of democracy to deliver a stable economy and that, apart from in Sudan and Morocco, most people believed that economies are weak under democracies; this perception had increased to around 70% in Iraq and Tunisia and around 60% in Palestine, Libya and Jordan. The survey by the Arab Barometer network interviewed 23,000 people across a number of Arab countries, including the Palestinian territories. A number of the countries, particularly in the Gulf, refused “full and fair access” to the survey.

It’s sad to see these results, because they reflect a lack of understanding of what a democracy can and can’t do. The benefit of a democracy is freedom of personal and political expression. It isn’t a guarantee of prosperity, but when a government in a democracy performs badly on the economy, as on any other issue, people are free to say so, the media are free to report people’s opinions on the matter and the people are able to vote in another party if the government fail to respond. They cannot always deliver prosperity; some things are beyond their control, such as the price of oil on the international market and the cost and availability of wheat if it mostly comes from a country that has been invaded. They can’t completely solve a water crisis if the country occupies a tract of land that is particularly vulnerable to desertification which is caused by climate change. But in a democracy, you can talk about this freely. In a dictatorship, if you speak out, you run the risk of being thrown in jail and if you demonstrate, you risk being battered with truncheons or shot dead in the street.

With the exception of Lebanon, every part of the Arab world has been a dictatorship of one kind or another since they were colonised. Some are monarchies, some are military dictatorships, some are one-party regimes that masquerade as democracies. Many of these were supported by foreign powers, including the UK, USA, France, Russia and increasingly nowadays China. In many of them, there was a large enough class of people who benefited for it to have a firm support base; it was not a tiny elite dominating the rest of the country but a large, often secularised middle class. In many of the countries that were not oil sheikhdoms, there was a perception that the people did not deserve or could not be trusted with democracy; if you gave Muslims a free vote, they would vote in Islamists, or if you gave poor people a free vote, they would vote in communists, and this was believed by both the secular ruling class and by policy-makers and opinion-formers in the western world. Meanwhile, the Arab world’s universities are among the lowest-ranked in the world, yet this is blamed on “Islam’s hostility to free inquiry” when secular dictatorships actually hold sway. They produce many of the world’s doctors and engineers, yet they emigrate and do actual research abroad. Muslims are less free in many Muslim countries than as minorities in western countries; in some countries they face harassment and violence if they wear traditional Muslim dress or go to the mosque to pray, especially in the morning. The old regime in Tunisia was one of the worst for this.

We all remember the Arab Spring uprisings, the hope for freedom after decades of dictatorships that were in the pockets of foreign powers and which stifled the intellectual life of every country. However, all of the revolutions either failed, led to civil war or slid back very quickly; Egypt was a dictatorship again after just two years, and Tunisia has now been recaptured by the old elite. In the case of Egypt, there were shortages which miraculously resolved themselves after the elected government was overthrown. Wherever there was a change of government, the old guard was left in positions of authority and allowed to contest elections as if they were an honourable opponent rather than a faction that believed they had a right to rule and were just waiting for the opportunity to re-establish that. The sad fact is that there are sections of society in all these countries that prefer dictatorship to a democracy where they do not rule.

South America also had a period from the 60s to the 80s where it fell under dictatorship, mostly by the military which had received American training that encouraged a doctrine of “national security” that privileged the wealthy at home and overseas. Yet those countries mostly returned to democracy and have remained so. None of the dictatorships succeeded in establishing dictatorship as the norm. Likewise, democracies were established in eastern Europe after the communist dictatorships forced on the region by Russian occupation following World War II. When the economy falters, there isn’t a call to just go back to communism or to a military government. The fact that in many Middle Eastern countries, people do react this way reflects a lack of patience with a new form of government and a lack of a democratic tradition which would give people an understanding of what a democracy can and cannot do and an appreciation of the freedom it brings.